It is quite natural for us to wonder why a great poet such as Lorca should devote so much energy and interest to a form of drama which in English-speaking countries is limited almost exclusively to the amusement of children. The reasons are several but simple. In Spain, as in other Mediterranean countries, puppet theatre is still a popular form of drama. That is to say, it is performed at fairs, festivals, and even in its own well established theatres—and performed for a general audience. And this holds true for both the major puppet traditions in the Spanish theatre: the violent Punch and Judy-like drama in which plot, theme, even logic are sacrificed to the brouhaha, as well as the more complex, romantic, musical, and somewhat narrative genre. In the romantic genre one finds three general approaches to the action.

“The problem, of course, is money.” As they used to say on the old radio program: Arthur J. Goldberg said it. The trouble is that everybody else has said it too, and though Arthur J. Goldberg was then Secretary of Labor and now Justice of the Supreme Court, he was a little out of order. For he ought to know that anything everybody is saying is true enough to be suspect. Money is a problem, let me not discount it; and the unions, and the movies, and the Play of the Week, and the mass media, and the proscenium arch, and fear of creeping socialism, and Minority Leader Dirksen (who helped kill the Federal Theatre by calling its plays “salacious tripe”), and the fire laws, and the decentralized hangover of Puritan morality, and “the youth of our country's culture,” and the fact that there is only one shining knight in tweeds, Tyrone Guthrie, to go around, and so on and so forth—but the true surd, the one vermiculate problem remains the people in the American theatre, those self-sacrificial lambs, who tell themselves that all the other problems are the main problem.

So you need a foreword. But what is there to say about a play from which I felt detached even before it was finished? To speak of its composition would be to evoke a world and climate without grandeur. But I would rather say a few words about the theatre in general. I dislike it. One will gather as much from reading this play .What I have been told about Japanese, Chinese, and Balinese revels and the perhaps magnified idea that persists in my brain make the formula of the Western theatre seem to me too coarse. One can only dream of an art that would be a profound web of active symbols capable of speaking to the audience a language in which nothing is said but everything portended.

But any poet who tried to realize this dream would see the haughty stupidity of actors and theatre people rise up in arms.

The Maids, produced for the first time in 1946 by Louis Jouvet at the Thèâtre de l'Athènèe, marks perhaps the beginning of “anti-theatre” in France. Certainly we are aware for the first time in The Maids of a strange new consciousness of theatre as in the same year Nathalie Sarraute in Portrait of a Man Unknown made us aware of a new concept of the novel. Sartre wrote of Nathalie Sarraute's “anti-novel”: “We live in an age of reflection and the novel is in process of reflecting on itself.” One might say with equal validity of Genet that his plays are theatre reflecting on the nature of theatre. It is this fact that makes his plays difficult to understand in any normal sense of the word. Nor are his plays “theatre within theatre” as Hamlet contains a play within a play.

The story of Corneille's Horatius (Horace)follows the incidents described in two chapters of Livy's history of the Roman Empire, with only minor modifications. The twin cities of Rome and Alba are so closely linked by marriage and other ties that they decide to settle their long-standing rivalry—which city shall rule the other—by selecting three warriors from each side. Rome chooses Horatius and his two brothers; Alba chooses Curiatus (who is engaged to marry Horatius’ sister, Camilla) and his two brothers. During the contest Horatius’ brothers are slain but Horatius, by a clever stratagem, separates the three wounded Curiatus brothers and kills them in turn. He is welcomed back as the hero of Rome and honored with laurels, but Camilla insults him for having killed her lover, refuses to recognize his victory and calls down curses on Rome. Horatius, in a continuing frenzy of patriotism, kills his own sister.

Ideals are fine. In most of the pages of this issue the writers are concerned with ideals. These pages are concerned with something more tangible: money.

The fact is, as we all know, today's theatre is run with money. Tomorrow's theatre, such as it may be, must also be solvent. I am not concerned, in the following paragraphs, with dreams or aspirations. I am concerned with certain economic facts of the present, certain economic trends that will shape the theatres of the future.

Who pays for the theatre in America? The audience. What is our audience today in America? First: what is our present Broadway audience?

The present Broadway audience, according to a survey made by Playbill magazine, consists of eleven million people. That is, the Broadway theatres fill about eleven million seats in a given season—sometimes the same people fill the same seats.

The central theme of Jean Genet's extraordinary play, surely one of the major works of the twentieth century, is best expressed in two phrases about the nature of the cosmos we may take the liberty of adapting from two famous philosophers, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibnitz (1646-1716) and Cardinal Nicholas of Cusa (ca. 1400-1464): the identity of indiscernibles and the coincidence of opposites.

The ordinary man fancies that the solid realities of respectable society and the contrived illusions of the brothel are as far apart as are life and death. The play declares another message having only an incidental connection with the brothel setting: Reality and illusion are, strictly speaking, indistinguishable from one another, as indistinguishable as are dying and living.

In fact, Genet goes a giant step farther in his non-Euclidian geometry.

When we talk of the “performing arts,” we must talk about all of them: the spoken drama, musical theatre, opera, ballet, and concert music. Up until now it has been generally true in the majority of American communities that most all spaces that could seat anywhere from one hundred to ten thousand people have, at one time or another, been used for performances of every kind, size, and description. It was inevitable that the artist made compromises which lessened—sometimes almost to the vanishing point—his effectiveness as a performer. Space designed specifically as a theatre does not make a good concert hall, nor does space designed specifically as a concert hall make a good theatre. This is true visually as well as acoustically. We can demonstrate that certain transformations are possible within a single facility which will adjust both the performing and audience spaces to quite opposite and diverse uses.

In 1869, Hendrik Ibsen, then 41, paused in his dramatic labors to compose a short poem. He had left his beloved Rome just one year before to settle in Dresden (he was to remain in exile from Norway until 1891), and he had just completed his first realistic prose play, The League of Youth, after having established his reputation as the author of Brand and Peer Gynt. Since The League of Youth contains strong satire on the hypocritical opportunism of the contemporary Norwegian Liberal, critics were beginning to charge Ibsen with having joined the Conservative faction. The poem—“To My Friend, the Revolutionary Orator”—is addressed to one of these critics, and is a polemical defense against the current charges. In these verses, Ibsen affirms that he is still a perfervid revolutionary—but he then proceeds to distinguish his own revolt from anything in recorded history.

I suppose the most beneficial result of your letter is the actual analysis on my part of what it is I am really doing. For many years I have been pulling better designs than the next fellow out of the hats of clients in financial corners. I can boast of never having had a rich client. I live at the top of my class but my work was at the bottom of the theatre world. I thought Izenour's theatres monstrously top-heavy, but had to admit he was more popular with the well-heeled lads and the conformists. Then someone pointed out to me the other day that perhaps I was building more theatres than he. On the other hand, your letter seemed to stigmatize my experimentation in actual “bricks-and-wood” and encourage, rather, flight-free drawings.

Finally I decided to stay with the “bricks-and-wood” and try to bring you around to a realization of what is actually going on in my world.

Although Ibsen's Hedda Gabler has recently enjoyed considerable off-Broadway success, critical confusion about the play has not appreciably abated. Reviews of the recent production merely emphasized the conflicting views which have been advanced since Hedda Gabler first appeared in 1890. It seems to be a play about an extraordinary woman—but extraordinary in precisely what way? Is she naturally cruel and malicious, or is she made so by the events one sees on stage? In a review entitled “A Beautiful Snake,” Whitney Balliett in the New Yorker, after admitting that various social problems are dealt with in the play, insists that Ibsen “was primarily interested in exploring ironically the cold depths of that changeless and most fascinating of all women—the bitch.” Alan Pryce-Jones, on the other hand, in Theatre Arts, complained that the New York production made Hedda's bitchiness too immediately apparent.

As Lorca's posthumous fame increases, the glint of political martyrdom, though still apparent, no longer dominates the picture. His plays are now performed almost everywhere, even recently in Spain itself. (There, for the first time since his murder in 1936, a dramatic work of his, Yerma, was produced in November, 1960.) He is required reading in hundreds of college courses. With Picasso's and Dali's his is one of the best-known of twentieth-century Spanish names. The new Aguilar edition of his complete works, a single leather-bound volume in the same format as Cervantes, Calderón de la Barca, and Lope de Vega, has made him a classic author. Perhaps the best sign that his reputation is secure is that some critics have begun to question his ascendancy over the five or six foremost Spanish writers of the period.

In his essay on “Emotional Memory” in TDR Summer 1962, and now, I believe, published as a pamphlet by Samuel French, Inc., Mr. Robert Lewis traces the phrase “emotional memory” back as far as 1925 and adds: “During the Group Theatre days, in the Thirties, we called it ‘Affective Memory’ (a term borrowed from an earlier French psychologist). But, by whatever name, it is accomplished, roughly as follows.”

The name is actually given in David Magarshack's Stanislavsky: A Life in these words:

When I was young and easy—not so long before we really reached for the absurd—and when theatre was all the thunder and hooves of the Old Vic or, if you chose, that something wild and psychotic in Stanislavski New York, I became involved in a very curious circumstance. It was then that the possibilities of a theatre of the marvelous dawned upon me.

I was working at the time as a social investigator for the New York City Department of Welfare. My clients were the mentally deteriorating, the physically disabled, old people left alone to die, frustrated and inept unwed mothers, and last, but not by any means the least, children: in other words, people representing that large segment of our population who do not know the theatre and to whom America, itself, is one huge stage show. Indeed, when I studied their case records which read like epics, I realized that nothing in our modern theatre would be inspirational to them.

Arthur Miller is one of those playwrights, like Thornton Wilder, whose reputation rests on a handful of plays. The quality of that reputation changes from year to year, from critic to critic, but now, five years after the production of his most recent play (the revision of A View from the Bridge), it is generally conceded—even by those who persist in not admiring his work—that Miller is one of the two playwrights of the postwar American theatre who deserve any consideration as major dramatists. Tennessee Williams is the other.

There are many ways of approaching Miller's work. In the late Forties, after All My Sons and Death of a Salesman, popular reviewers tended to embrace him enthusiastically while consciously intellectual critics, displaying the carefulness of their kind, hoped that in explaining him they might explain him away.

What makes The Blacks an entirely unique, entrancing, and disturbing theatrical venture is that the very ground of theatrical experience—the community of understanding and sympathy between the people in the audience and the humanity represented on the stage—seems to be pulled out from under our feet. Instead we become parts, both as objects and participants, of a “black” rite of murder and exorcism. The actors inform us at the opening of the play that there can be no relation between us and them other than hostility and contempt. They assure us, moreover, that they shall have the decency to make real communication between us and them impossible. The Negro (Diouf) who tries to adopt a conciliatory tone, who hopes to come to an understanding by engaging our sympathy, is promptly denounced by the group as a traitor; his place is in the ranks of the white spectators.